OmniGraffle is a perfect tool for our uses
OmniGraffle has tons of uses, not least of which is as an image and graphic design tool. Not needing major graphic design software …
Overview
What is OmniGraffle?
OmniGraffle is a wireframing tool for Mac users.
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Product Demos
Generating a site map in one minute with OmniGraffle - Demo
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Loading Omnigraffle Diagram into CLIPS rule engine
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SVG Animation Demo
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Brief Demo of Omnigraffle
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OmniGraffle 6 Mind Map Demo
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Product Details
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What is OmniGraffle?
OmniGraffle Technical Details
| Operating Systems | Unspecified |
|---|---|
| Mobile Application | No |
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Community Insights
TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!
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OmniGraffle is a versatile tool that users heavily rely on for a wide range of tasks. One key use case for the product is wireframing, roughing out, and documenting content models and site maps. This is particularly useful for the strategy team, as they can easily create workflow diagrams and produce detailed annotations that are difficult to convey via a prototype. Additionally, OmniGraffle addresses low visibility issues in web projects by allowing users to create flowcharts, behavioral flows, and site map trees.
The software serves as an excellent replacement for Visio, offering better visuals and flexibility in wireframing and design activities. Users utilize OmniGraffle to create process flow diagrams, business flow charts, and other diagrams required by their company or department. Moreover, it is used beyond traditional design purposes, with users leveraging the tool to structure texts such as lyrics, poetry, or novels to find the best flow and logic in their thematic elements.
OmniGraffle's flexible and large format medium makes it ideal for mapping out ideas and concepts that require content organization, such as messaging frameworks. Furthermore, it is a popular choice for technical documentation purposes where technical diagrams need to be created. The software also facilitates collaboration across teams by enabling the creation of workflow diagrams that can be easily shared with non-design stakeholders.
For website projects, OmniGraffle helps users chart out website and user flows through flow charts and information architecture. It plays a significant role during the discovery phase of understanding user needs and customer journey by visualizing user flows, basic journey maps, brainstorming sessions, and visual note-taking. Furthermore, designers rely on OmniGraffle to build wireframe sketches that are shared with clients during the initial project phase.
Overall, OmniGraffle offers a comprehensive set of features that cater to various industries and use cases. Its ability to address different visualization needs makes it a valuable tool for wireframing, diagramming, and content organization.
Users recommend the following:
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Test the software using the trial period before purchasing to determine if it meets your needs and if it is easy to use.
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Consider alternative tools for drag and drop features and pre-made high-fi widgets. Also, explore more powerful options for flowcharts and business logic charts.
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Seek answers on blogs and YouTube videos in addition to relying solely on the provided documentation and tutorials. Study the smaller hot keys and tricks in Omnigraffle for better productivity. Try other tools like Adobe Illustrator or Balsamiq Mockups depending on the type of work you do. Additionally, consider Keynote, InVision, or Foundation/HTML for a more efficient workflow.
Overall, users appreciate Omnigraffle's value for money and its capabilities in wireframing, data modeling, and building flow diagrams. However, they encourage potential users to thoroughly evaluate their specific needs before investing in any tool.
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Reviews
(1-6 of 6)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
OmniGraffle is my company’s tool of choice for creating workflow diagrams across teams and with non-design stakeholders. While the design team uses other tools, such as Balsamiq and Sketch, to do design-specific work, OmniGraffle is what we use to work with other teams, such as Strategy, Instructional Design, and Research. We also use it for mapping out content models, envisioning and designing frameworks, creating technical diagramming, and mapping out site maps. We use OmniGraffle to get on the same page before we get deep into our product design workflows.
- The ability to easily map out process flows for users of a wide range of tech comfort levels—The design is intuitive enough for even people with lower tech comfort levels to visually chart process flows. We have never had to do significant onboarding for less tech-savvy colleagues—this is a huge timesaver!
- Collaborative mind mapping—OmniGraffle is a great platform to get together with people and brainstorm ideas in the early stages of a project, then link ideas together to create visual relationships to inform business and product design decisions.
- Communicating strategy to stakeholders—Communicating the complexities of a workflow to stakeholders is a lot easier and more effective, with a diagram that clearly shows the relationships between factors rather than showing them a PowerPoint that, because of its slide-by-slide nature, makes it difficult to consistently show how different factors play into an overall workflow.
- There could be more scaffolding to support new users in getting to know how to best use all of the many features and tools it provides.
- There could be more support for printing. Many of our process flows extend beyond just one page, and OmniGraffle is rather finicky about printing multipage documents.
- We could use this tool more effectively if there was the ability to have real-time team collaboration. Document handoffs can be a point of missed communication, so it’d be great if we could ever have the option of working together in the same place at the same time.
We're a full strategy/design/development shop, and our team is heavily tilted towards Macs. Although the design team has shifted to production-focused tools like Sketch for most of their early stage deliverables, the Strategy team makes heavy use of Omnigraffle for wireframing, roughing out and documenting content models and site maps, etc. On the development site, most of our architects have settled on Omnigraffle for technical diagramming as well — it's not the 800lb Visio gorilla, but it does everything we need it to.
- For us, mapping and content model documentation are Omnigraffle's sweet spot. It has enough presentation/styling control to ensure a clean, consistent look that's compatible with the rest of our corporate branding, but lets us focus on the core challenge of communicating complicated relationships and processes to stakeholders.
- For wireframing, a few specific features make OmniGraffle particularly useful. Its "sketch" line and fill styles make it easy to throw together some boxes-and-lines mockups that convey basic layout and priority decisions about a new design without implying a particular stylistic treatment. For higher fidelity mockups, it supports a large library of free and commercial UI shapes for OSX, IOS, Android, Windows, Bootstrap, and generic Web sites. Building out a set of shapes/components for quick wireframing and sharing them across an organization is easy, too.
- Although the large library of reusable "shapes" makes it possible to build stuff like entity-relationship diagrams, flowcharts, and UML diagrams, it lacks Visio's ability to alter a shape's appearance/behavior by adding metadata to the shape itself. (I.E., changing color when a shape has a particular tag added to it). It is possible to add metadata to shapes, and OmniGraffle's advanced scripting support makes it possible to make custom plugins that automate color/style changes, but baking data-driven features right into the app would be a welcome addition.
- Import/Export has improved dramatically over the past several versions, but export in formats like SVG and DXF is still a little too fussy to use for precise CAD work. If you need to spit out PDFs, PNGs, and occasionally import/export simple Visio files, it's fine.
- Although OmniGraffle has a solid iPad version, exchanging files between the desktop and iOS versions requires "OmniSync," a passable but clunky file-sharing solution that's specific to Omni* products. I understand that Apple makes it difficult for non-App-Store products to use iCloud effectively, but it's still disappointing.
February 07, 2019
THE diagramming software tool for OS X
I use OmniGraffle the same way that others use Micrfosoft Visio, primarily for technical diagrams for my documentation. In my particular case, I am the only person using it, and that is because I came into this position as a user of Apple products for years and continue to use it at home. This department uses all Windows notebooks for Windows server support. The bad news for me is that there isn't a version that runs on a PC, so if I'm working on a drawing in Visio at the office and want to take it home and work on it, I can import it into Visio, but complex arcs don't import cleanly due to its algorithms for computing sine and co-sine values during the import.
- OmniGraffle is fairly simple to use, but the one thing I think it does best is working with curved lines, particularly if you are using some of the available arc templates. Drop an arc onto your page, then tell it the dimensions it needs to be, and viola! Done. Manipulating the arcs is as simple as clicking and dragging offset points.
- OmniGraffle has also done an excellent job in stirring up the creative minds of many people who create templates and tools to work with OmniGraffle (not that Microsoft hasn't done so either), and managed to get the bulk of those into well organized repositories.
- What it all boils down to for me is: it just works. One doesn't need to have a computer science degree to work with it either. It is as simple or complex as you want it to be.
- The ability to import Visio drawings is important to a lot of people. However, if one is importing a Visio drawing that has a complex arcs in it, they are not going to import properly. You end up with a drawing in OmniGraffle that doesn't look like it does in Visio - the arc lines are all off.
- If one has a very complex diagram that needs to fit on one page but extends close to the margins, you could end up getting a little frustrated because the program keeps wanting to drag another page into the fray.
- It may be something very simple to do, but I haven't yet found out how to specify exact page sizes for my drawings. If I just take the default, I'll get an 8/5" x 11" portrait page and have to focus on ensuring everything fits right. On the other hand, if I create a large page to start with because I know it isn't all going to fit on one letter-size page, resizing the page when I'm done is not a pretty picture.
November 15, 2018
Easy way to outline concepts you need to communicate to others
I use OmniGraffle to map out ideas and concepts that require a flexible, large format medium for organizing content. For example, if I'm currently using OmniGraffle to map out a messaging framework for internal use. It helps me easily link ideas together and create hierarchies, which would be difficult using a presentation tool like PowerPoint or keynote. If you need a way of getting abstract ideas on paper and exploring relationships among them, OmniFocus is a great tool for that.
- Mind mapping. You can easily link ideas together and OmniFocus can automatically arrange them in a presentable format.
- Wireframing. If you're working on simple design concepts, it's a great way to show ideas to designers.
- Outlining process flows. If you're outlining a process, such as marketing automation, it's perfect.
- No support for team collaboration. I would really like to see a way to share files to iCloud so that others can access and edit.
- Better print settings. If you're trying to print a document across many pages, it's not easy to make this happen.
- No ability to pre-configure settings. For example, I have to manually change the unit of measure from "inches" to "pixels" when I create a new document, would like the ability to change that fundamentally.
February 01, 2018
OmniGraffle is simply the best choice for modelling on the Mac
OmniGraffle is rapidly becoming the modeling tool of choice for the organisation; we are seeing broadening adoption of the product across the whole organisation.
We were looking for a Mac-compatible modeling tool - similar to Visio for the PC - and OmniGraffle was by far the best choice on the market.
We were looking for a Mac-compatible modeling tool - similar to Visio for the PC - and OmniGraffle was by far the best choice on the market.
- Ease of use and time to adopt software
- Multi-device support
- Scripting capability
- High-end modelling product
- More templates stencils and samples
- Data integration
March 20, 2017
Omnigraffle, a good tool for writers and songwriters
I mainly use OmniGraffle in order to structure texts when they are in work in progress status, from lyrics to poetry or novels. It helps me to structure my thoughts and ideas, and to find the best logic in the thematics used in the texts. I can keep references to the topics I intend to speak about, such as texts, images or links. By reorganizing them in different ways, Omnigraffle gives me a global vision which helps to find the best flow.
- Structuring a novel is a very difficult exercise, as it is the basis on which everything will be built. Omnigraffle allows you to visualize a dramatic progression, and keep in mind the various references and situations I want to see appearing throughout the history I'm writing.
- It is often important to switch phrases or select different verses in a song, Omnigraffle makes it easy to visualize the different options.
- Promotion is a vital part in the life of artistic projects. Creating a strategy and explaining it is easier when you can have a more flexible tool than PowerPoint for example.
- Well, let's dream and imagine a 3D version of the software, which would allow you to have different points of view on a situation.
- Several panels on the same page would be nice in order to compare different versions of a project.
- A historical visualization of the evolution of a project would be nice too.